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Happiness – Day Eight – Bumps

March 20, 2009 Filed Under: Business Musings

This post is part of a multi-day series on fostering happiness in your life.

The Bumps Along the Road

This is my “depressed stance.” When you’re depressed, it makes a lot of difference how you stand. The worst thing you can do is straighten up and hold your head high because then you’ll start to feel better. If you’re going to get any joy out of being depressed, you’ve got to stand like this.
— Charlie Brown

Everyone has down times and our challenges to overcome. We all walk the path of life’s ups and downs and sometimes the up path can be steep.

This is where friends, family and community come in again. People with close friends, family and a strong community recover faster from down times, failures and sadness. Studies show that isolation exacerbates unhappiness whereas friends and family and community lift our spirits.

The I in illness is isolation, and the crucial letters in wellness are we. ~Author unknown, as quoted in Mimi Guarneri, The Heart Speaks: A Cardiologist Reveals the Secret Language of Healing

With friends we share our achievements, failures, strengths, and vulnerabilities. Good friends are there in good times and bad. We participate in each others’ lives. We share our feelings. We don’t go it alone.

When we’re going through our troubled time, we have our daily plan. We don’t have to think about all our decisions because we’ve done the roadmap – our goals and our vision for our life. So, it’s easier to eat well, exercise, spend time in nature, write in our gratitude journal, and spend time with positive friends. All these things nourish us and we recover faster.

Finally, there’s laughter. Laughter sends endorphins into the bloodstream and relieves pain, both physical and mental. Laughter has been described as “inner jogging”, “respiratory gymnastics”, “the stress fighter”, and “a tranquilizer with no side effects”. Well, it all sounds good! Hurray for those great giggles we’ve had at the craziest times and hurray for our friends who make us laugh!

Sure, we find ourselves in the doldrums sometimes, but we don’t have to dwell there.
We can just choose to shift gears. Helen Keller said, “When one door closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.”

Happiness tips for the doldrums:

Smile, even if you don’t feel like it. Smiling automatically triggers your endorphins. And if someone smiles back at you – presto! more endorphins.
Help someone else who’s having difficulty.
Do something productive to take your mind off your problem.
Decide to stop worrying.
Make lists of the things you’re grateful for in your life.
Count in for five, count out for five as you breathe. When you’re counting, you won’t be able to think of your negative or worrisome thoughts
Remember, happiness is a choice. Look in the mirror and say, with enthusiasm “Happiness is a choice and I choose to be happy!” with a big grin. Do this five times and I guarantee, though you may feel silly, you’ll also improve your mood.

PS – This overview post above is meant for those of us that have normal bouts of anxiety or sadness. If you are clinically depressed, these are good and helpful tips to consider in conjunction with vising your doctor for a more serious chat.

Happiness – Day Four – Goals

March 12, 2009 Filed Under: Business Musings

Our Goals & Accomplishments

He started to sing as he tackled the thing
That couldn’t be done, and he did it.—
Edgar A. Guest, American poet

Those of you who did a vision for your business also set goals in my January “Kick Start Your Business” series. Here’s another look at goals on a more personal level. Setting and achieving goals is one way to increase your happiness quotient.

It’s wonderful to dream. With just a little encouragement, we can close our eyes and conjure up a whole new life for ourselves. But a dream is just a dream until we make it our vision, something we are determined to move toward. Then we have to set concrete goals and take action to achieve them, step by step.

A goal is the basic unit of life design. A goal is something reachable, not a mirage that keeps receding ahead of us. A true goal is something that will hold still and let itself be caught. It’s concrete and we’ll know beyond a doubt when we accomplish it. Goals need to be specific, measurable, time oriented, realistic and most importantly, achievable bite-sized chunks.

Many months ago, the now famous Barack Obama once said, “If you’re walking down the right path and you’re willing to keep walking, eventually you’ll make progress,” and we watched him do it, step by step, for a long time, against all odds. He had the (almost impossible) vision, and he accomplished it by achieving one small goal after another.

Set goals for yourself and your personal (not just business!) life, write them out, keep them visible, break them into daily or weekly pieces. That way, you’ll learn to master the use of your time; you’ll experience ongoing accomplishments and a general sense of achievement. This helps to bring with a sense of contentment (or “happiness!)

Although we often overestimate how much we will accomplish in any given day (I certainly do), we generally underestimate how much we can accomplish in a year, given just a little progress every day.

In my personal life, I have a variety of goals. One of them is to learn Chinese. I’ve broken this goal down into daily and monthly tasks: Every weekday, I will practice Chinese for 15 minutes per day. Every month, I will hire a tutor to help me with my Chinese progress. This is just one of the many personal goals I have for the year. Like little rivers flowing to a big ocean, they all help to support the overall vision I have for my life.

I long to accomplish a great and noble tasks, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker. — Helen Keller

If you have not sat down and created a roadmap for your year, review these posts on goal setting (here and here) and just. do. it. Write them down. Break them down. And, get to work on achieving them because making forward movement in your life is a valuable component to feeling satisfied, content and yes, happy.

“If you observe a really happy man, you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias in his garden. He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a button that has rolled under the radiator.” – Psychologist V. Beran Wolfe

Have a question about this blog post? Come join us at Bramble Berry’s Facebook page and we can help you out with any of your soapy questions!

Happiness – Day Two – Friends & Community

March 10, 2009 Filed Under: Business Musings

This post is part of a multi-day series on fostering happiness in your life.

Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family: Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one. — Jane Howard

Family, Friends and Community

Close family and friends give us many gifts. They appreciate us, they celebrate with us, they laugh with us, they cry with us. They share their knowledge and talent and resources. And we give them those gifts in return. Sharing our lives is a foundation for happiness; we all need family and friends and community.

A recent study reported in CNN magazine points out that people’s happiness quotient goes up significantly (up to 25%!) if they have a close friend that lives nearby, a close sibling that lives nearby, a neighbor that they are friends with, and even if a friend of a friend lives nearby. What’s more, happiness ripples through social networks. If we have friends who are happy people, it boosts our own feelings of happiness and contentment.

For each of us, family, friends and community may be different. Some of us may have a large, extended family, or one close sibling, or a favorite aunt, or a family that we’ve adopted. Some of us may have a few close friends, or we may be social butterflies. Some of us find community in the church we go to, or we are friends with some of the parents at our child’s school, or we belong to a jogging group or a book club.

George Burns, the American actor and comedian, famously said “Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.” Well, no one said families are perfect, (or for that matter, roommates, or friends) but we’re social creatures and we strive to have good relationships. And when we do? Our happiness quotient goes up!

Then there’s the concept of community at work. Workplace studies that focus on employee engagement and retention say that people want to have “a community at work”. If you spend seven or eight hours of every day at your workplace, you want to feel a sense of belonging and connection.

I once worked in a workplace where the secretary was the ultimate social convener. She organized Halloween parties, Valentine’s parties, birthday parties, picnic parties. We were a happy department and the other departments gravitated toward our end of the office.

Friends and family and community are there for us in bad times as well as good times, the times when we’re sad or disappointed or grieving. We share out emotions and it helps us to recover sooner, to not get stuck, to make our way back to happiness.

Friends and family and community are also there for us when we celebrate, whether it’s a graduation or a wedding or a birth or a raise or a retirement or some small personal victory. Celebrations bring people closer together and spread happiness.

If this is an area lacking in your life, there are some easy concrete steps you can take to add community to your life:

Go to church. This is one of the best places to find community.
Join a club (book club, knitting club, spelunking club)
Go to the group classes at the gym.
Reconnect with old friends by making 1 hour per week a “phone call” hour where you just talk to friends on the phone.

“Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed.
Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute
with love, grace and gratitude.”
– Productivity consultant Denis Waitley

Have a question about this blog post? Come join us at Bramble Berry’s Facebook page and we can help you out with any of your soapy questions!

Happiness – Day One – Introduction

March 9, 2009 Filed Under: Business Musings

I recently read a book (okay, “recently” being six months ago and I’m finally getting around to blogging about it but who’s tracking, really?) called “Happy for No Reason” by Marci Shimoff (get your own copy of the book from Amazon here). According to Ms. Shimoff, the year 2020 will see depression become second only to heart disease in terms of the global burden of illness. She was motivated enough to write a book about how to maintain an inner well of happiness, no matter what situations are going on around you. I was inspired by her book. I took many of the suggestions she has in it and structured an entire “system” that I’ve been diligently following for almost 7 months now and I can genuinely say that “Yes, I feel happier compared to before I started the happiness framework.” Consider this series a super long book review coupled with practical advice both from the book and from the extra readings I’ve been doing after I finished the book.

What is Happiness?

“Well,” said Pooh, “what I like best,” and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called. — A.A. Milne

We all know about that kind of anticipation – when we’re about to indulge ourselves in one of our favorite treats – dark chocolate with macadamia nuts, our favorite sauvignon blanc, a great novel, a shopping spree, a ylang ylang bubble bath, a romantic dinner with our sweetie, a walk by the ocean, a two-week vacation to the Caribbean – whatever makes you happy and excited. We all have our special treats and extravagances that bring happiness and excitement.

But it seems there are different definitions of happiness. Life-enhancing pleasures, like Pooh diving into the honey pot, are often referred to as “momentary happiness” or “transitory happiness” or “pleasure” – wonderful but fleeting. Then there’s what, in many studies, is referred to as “enduring happiness” or “contentment”, where an individual maintains an enduring level of happiness through the normal ups and downs of life. We say someone is “a happy person” or that someone “always has a positive attitude”, and it isn’t because their life is better or easier than anyone else’s. Eckhart Tolle, author of The Power of Now, says: “Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within.”

Many studies have shown that wealth, income, job status, etc. do not make people happy and we’ve all seen examples of that. Studies of people winning the big lotteries show that five years later their happiness level is the same as it was before they won. If they weren’t happy people before they had their big win, they aren’t any happier five years after. What seems to distinguish happy people is that they have a unique attitude – a different way of thinking about things and doing things. They interpret the world and go about their lives in a different way.

It seems to be generally agreed that individuals start out with a set range of happiness, possibly genetic, that counts for about40 to 50% of our tendency towards happiness, whereas our circumstances count for about 10%. That leaves 40 to 50% of our happiness that is voluntary. This includes all aspects of our life over which we have a relatively high degree of control, including our thoughts and actions and attitude. How we choose to think and act has a significant impact on how happy we are, which means we can take steps to being a happier person – a choice that stands to make a big difference in our life and the lives of those around us. Happiness is a choice. Make the choice to be happy and reaffirm that choice daily.

“It’s snowing still,” said Eeyore gloomily. “So it is.” “And freezing.” “Is it?” “Yes,” said Eeyore. “However,” he said, brightening up a little, “we haven’t had an earthquake lately.” — A.A. Milne

Have a question about this blog post? Come join us at Bramble Berry’s Facebook page and we can help you out with any of your soapy questions!

Goal Check-In

February 28, 2009 Filed Under: Personal Ramblings

You want to set a goal that is big enough that in the process of achieving it you become someone worth becoming.
— Jim Rohn

How are you doing on your 2009 goals? We’re just entering March which means that you’re 17% of the way through the year. Are you 17% to your goal yet? Are you making daily, small incremental amounts of effort to ensure that you are making real progress? This is the year for change, challenge and innovation. Opportunity is everywhere. We just need to be relentless in our efforts so we’re ready to swing for the fences when that perfect opportunity arises.

Many of you posted goals here, here and here. If you’ve fallen off the wagon, take a moment to re-read your goals and recommit yourself to excellence in 2009. Just think about how thrilled and happy you’ll be when December 31st rolls around and you’re 10 pounds lighter, have 5 more wholesale accounts or have strengthened your family relationships.

Guest Blog: Going the Extra Mile

October 10, 2008 Filed Under: Business Musings

Going the Extra Mile will Get You Even Farther
by Jack Canfield

Successful people go the extra mile. Plain and simple.

They do it because it says multitudes about their work ethic and character. They stand out from the crowd because of their extra efforts. They are unwilling to give up, even in the face of difficult times.

They get the promotions, they get the loyal customers, they grow their businesses twice as fast, they get financial rewards, job security, and they go home feeling satisfied.

Do you exceed expectations? Do you surprise people with more than they were expecting from you? Do you look for ways that you could be of more service, or for projects that you could help out on?

People notice hard workers. They notice special services and all the small touches that make dealing with you so pleasurable. And when they are talking to their friends they will mention you and recommend you because you are the one who stands out.

Do you wonder what’s in it for you? Do you think it’s unfair to give more when you’re not being compensated for it or recognized for it? Do you have the “it’s not my job” mentality?

To be successful you must change your thinking. You can only win by making extra efforts. People who go the extra mile always get payback. You will discover yourself becoming more self-confident, more self-reliant and more influential with those around you.

You will get noticed! People will see that you pay attention to detail, that you consider all the small things that really make a business successful, that you care about your image, and that you belong with all the other people who work hard to achieve. You will attract new business and new opportunities.

Listen to any success story and you will hear of someone who worked exceptionally hard to get what they wanted.

You’ll hear how they put in the extra time, did what wasn’t part of their job description, and over-delivered on what was asked of them. You’ll hear how they stuck at it until they broke through, and usually you’ll hear how it only took them a couple of years to do it.

What have you been doing for the past couple of years? The same thing? How quickly have you advanced? How quickly has time gone by? Think of what you could accomplish if you made it a habit to exceed everyone’s expectations. Image what doors could be open to you if you decided to be of better service and value.

How are you willing to go the extra mile? What kind of extra service are you willing to provide in order to stand out from the rest? What areas of your life could you be giving more of your effort and time, becoming more valuable, and improving your reputation?

Be willing to treat everyone like you’d treat your dearest friend. Don’t skimp on service. Don’t be mediocre or run of the mill. Show people what you are capable of. Show them that you care about your image and reputation.

When it comes to success, the people who are willing to go the extra mile get there that much faster!

About the Author: Jack Canfield, America’s #1 Success Coach, is founder of the billion-dollar book brand Chicken Soup for the Soul and a leading authority on Peak Performance and Life Success. If you’re ready to jump-start your life, make more money, and have more fun and joy in all that you do, get your FREE success tips from Jack Canfield now at: www.FreeSuccessStrategies.com

Eucalyptus to Remove Pen Marks?

October 1, 2008 Filed Under: Personal Ramblings

In Lucky Magazine, designer Nicholas Kunz mentioned that Eucalyptus Essential Oil is well, essential to removing pen marks from clothing.

Lucky magazine says:

Put on gloves. Gently dab a small amount of the oil on the stain with a soft cloth. Let it sit for a few seconds and then delicately blot and rub until the stain is gone. Launder as usual. This works best on cottons and light woven fabrics; never try it on leather.

If anyone tries it and it works, let me know.

A Violent but Good Plan

September 24, 2008 Filed Under: Business Musings

Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.

— Robert Collier

I did an interview this morning with Annette Bau, founder of The Millionaire Series. I was honored to be an interview subject and chatted on about my experience in growing Bramble Berry and Otion for over an hour. At the end, Annette asked if I had any last thoughts. Amazingly, even after talking for over an hour, I did! My final thoughts went something like this:

“It’s okay if you’re not cut out to be an entrepreneur. We’re taught in all the magazines and movies out there that being an entrepreneur is some mythical amazing thing, that everyone loves it and that there is fulfillment to be had just by being self-employed. That may very well be true for some. But if it’s not you, don’t beat yourself up. Learn to find the joy in what you do every day, even if it’s not starting a company and loving it.

But, if it is you and you do want to pursue your passion, just know that every single day can be a challenge and a journey of itself.

The reality is that things break, people fail you and sometimes, the days get really long and tough. But, if you just remember why you got into the business to start with and keep putting one foot in front of the other, you’ll get there. Daily incremental amounts of small effort, the same boring task day in and day out, eventually produce miraculous results. So, if you have a dream, start on it today and do 5 things, every day, that get you closer to your goal. Remember, a good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.”

Delegation is Good (but hard to do right)

August 26, 2008 Filed Under: Business Musings

Bramble Berry’s COO was on vacation last week (that’s us, pretending to fly a plane – notice who is actually steering?). Besides making me desperately appreciate him even more, I took away a renewed appreciation in the fine art and skill of delegation. It turns out, when you over-delegate and under-instruct, nothing much happens. Or rather, much happens, none of it right.

My tips for delegating, after a week of doing a super sub par job of it:

1. Clearly outline the desired outcome – You’d be surprised at how hard this is. I’ve been failing at it for ten years now and still find it a struggle. If you want Mary Jo’s package to make it to her in British Columbia, with correct custom forms, for less than $35, by next Friday, you HAVE to spell all of that out…

2. In writng – If you want to delegate effectively, write out your desired outcome (and steps for success). My staff are often shocked to get an email from me when I could easily just turn around and tell them my wish. Just by writing it, you will gain clarity and focus as you try to make sense of your mind spaghetti on paper. In addition, giving a valued staff member your expectations in writing helps to ensure that they are exceedingly (and painfully) clear on your expectations.

3. With follow-up – Would you give a child in middle school an assignment worthy of a high schooler and not help, follow up, coach and mentor? Just like you wouldn’t tell your 15-year-old to go drive your stick shift BMW on the first try, it’s poor planning to delegate without mentorship. As Norman demonstrates with his son on the Bramble Berry forklift, hands on help and support are important. As a leader, your job is to instruct, mentor and coach your team to the next level of greatness – the depth of skill reservoir they didn’t even know they possessed! You do this through…

4. Scheduled Communication – Every day at Bramble Berry, we have team meetings. The warehouse meets, the key Management meet and the Customer Service Department meets. We cover the same things: (a) What did you do today? (b) Are you stuck? (c) What went well? How can we do more of that? Daily communication is a key to complete organizational alignment. It’s also a good check in for the projects you’ve delegated. “So, Apryl, how is that newsletter design I asked you to do?” (Hint for Soap Queen readers: the newsletter is coming out this week. If you want to shop two sales at once, go sign up for it here)

5. Praise for Things Done Right – No one runs your business as well as you do. No one can make your soap, pull your orders, invoice and talk to the customers the way you do. I get that. But if your helpers even do an 80% job, they deserve praise. They deserve recognition for a job done well. And they deserve your confidence that maybe, sometimes, they do run certain aspects of your business even better than you can do. Your way isn’t always the best way to do something. Let them tweak the process along the way and give them kudos when the end result is successful.

And, if they didn’t do an 80% job, head back to Step 3 and start the entire process again.

Resources to help you on the path to Delegation Success:

Jack Canfield Delegation Worksheet

Listen to Jack talk about delegating and the finances behind delegation

I only use DOVE!

August 12, 2008 Filed Under: Business Musings

Click here to see the entire list of Commonly Asked Craft Show questions.

Click here to see the answer to “Why does your soap cost so much?”

Click here to see the answer to “Cool! How is this made?”

Click here to see the answer to “Cool! Can you teach me to make this?”

Click here to see the answer to “Cool! Where do you buy your supplies?”

I only use DOVE! It’s over half moisturizers. How is your soap on my face?

Short Answer: Ah, Dove! That’s a good start for your face and certainly better than much of what is out there. I really like the soap we make here at Happy Local Soaping Company, especially because we have a gentle soap bar formulation with no fragrance or essential oil. It smells like … well, soap because sometimes fragrances or essential oils can irritate skin and we certainly wouldn’t want to do that. It’s just $6. Would you like to try a bar? (if no, end with: “Here, take a sample and try it for a couple weeks and see what you think.”)

Note: In my opinion, the key when addressing any of these comparison type questions is to remain positive about the “competitor” (or fellow vendor) while pointing out your products’ positive features. If you say negative things about your fellow vendor, it’s possible that this negativity will reflect poorly on you. Plus, while a sale is a sale, it’s rarely a good plan to scare a customer into buying your products. Gentle, positive persuasion is a more sustainable sales tactic.

Longer Answer: Ah, Dove! That’s a good start for your skin and certainly better than much of what is out there. You’re in good company. Dove has about 23% of the facial beauty bar market so there’s lots of people that like it. In fact, I used to use Dove myself before I started making my own soap. One of the reasons I really like my soap is because I use only vegetable oils and which definitely makes my soap over 25% cream ingredients too. After all, what’s a cream except water and oils mixed together?

My Gentle Skin Soap is fragrance free too. Did you know fragrances often can irritate sensitive faces? Another reason I prefer my soap to Dove is because Dove actually has a pretty long ingredient list and while life can be better with better chemistry, in this case, I like keeping it simple. My soap has X ingredients: coconut oil, palm oil, olive oil and a little bit of shea butter. It will clean your skin and leave it nicely primed for your sunscreen or night cream application.

Finally, I really appreciate that you’re here at this local show. Did you know that money spent on buying local usually contributes three times as much back to the community as dollars spent at chain stores? Sales with me help to fund small business jobs, helping me contribute to the city through my taxes and allows me and the other crafters here at this show invest in our community. So, thanks for thinking about switching from Dove to my soap. It’s just $6 per bar and I think you’ll be thrilled about it. Do you want anything else with that bar?

Resources:

Dove MSDS Sheet (showing “fragrance” as an ingredient)
Ingredient List in Dove: sodium lauroyl isethionate, stearic acid, sodium tallowate or sodium palmitate, lauric acid,sodium isethionate, water, sodium stearate, cocamidopropyl betaine, sodium cocoate or sodium palm kernelate, fragrance, sodium chloride, tetrasodium EDTA, trisodium etidronate, titanium dioxide
Market Photo: “Les savons de Marseille” by Garrulus
Dove Ad: courtesy of RoadsidePictures

Sales Calls Woes

August 9, 2008 Filed Under: Personal Ramblings

Here is an inspirational quote for when you feel like you couldn’t possibly make one more sales call:

“Many of life’s failures are men who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

Thomas Edison

Cleaning Up Your Pricing

July 16, 2008 Filed Under: Business Musings

Reviewing your COGS (Cost of Goods Sold – what it costs you to make the product you sell) is a bit like deep cleaning your house. You need to do it and you know you need to do it, but you don’t do it enough.

Bramble Berry recently did a poll of approximately 5% of our customers about Patchouli Essential Oil usage trends. Why Patchouli Essential Oil?

Because Patchouli Essential Oil has had a well-documented, meteoric price increase for 2008. What used to be purchased for $30-$40 per pound is currently selling for $182 per pound. Why is this? Supply and demand for the year – there was more Patchouli Essential Oil purchased on contracts by the big perfume houses than the producers made.

Scarcity = price increases. I keep hearing that this situation will start to stabilize in September but in the meantime, we undertook a survey to see what our customers were doing to work with and around the Patchouli issue.

The results were fascinating:

81.2% of respondents used Patchouli Essential Oil regularly

Of those Patchouli users, 16% were raising their pricing and 22% were changing formulations (switching to fragrance oil, using different base notes).

The rest of Patchouli fans were keeping their price stable and losing money in the hopes that the pricing will come down. This post is for the 62% of you that are holding on and not increasing prices or changing formulations of your Patchouli based products.

This is an opportunity to discuss general pricing practices in business. How exactly do you price your products? More importantly, are you pricing high enough to sustain a stable and profitable future for your business?

The reasons you are in business can be any number of things, some deeply personal and intangible. One reason we should all share is a desire to be successful. I often remark that

“I am so lucky to have my job because it’s practically my hobby.”

It’s what I would do naturally even if I wasn’t getting paid. Or would I?

The truth is that when I put in a 60 hour work week, I need something tangible to show at the end of the week for my efforts. That something tangible – the easily measurable thing – is money, profits. While profit need not be obscene, the longevity and stability of my business requires them for investment in the future, for infrastructure costs and to ensure job continuity for my staff.

In these uncertain economic times, it’s more important than ever that you price for the future. In the face of unrelenting layoffs and dismal financial market news, you need to be in control of your destiny with your small business. Your small soap business may be the rudder on your family’s financial ship, steering you to safety over the next few years of economic turmoil in the US.

That’s why you shouldn’t sit by idly and hope that Patchouli prices come down. It is imperative that you review all of your costs on a regular basis to ensure that your profit margins are protected so you can plan for a stable future for yourself, your family and your business.

Cool! Where Do You Buy Your Supplies?

June 18, 2008 Filed Under: Business Musings

Click here to see the entire list of Commonly Asked Craft Show questions.

Click here to see the answer to “Why does your soap cost so much?”

Click here to see the answer to “Cool! How is this made?”

Click here to see the answer to “Cool! Can you teach me to make this?”

Cool! Where do you buy your supplies!?

Answer You Might Want to Give: “Sorry, no. I’m not telling you where I buy my stuff so you can go copy all of my best ideas. Learn how to do it like I did it – from scratch with hard work and effort put into it. Good luck.”

Or “Can you keep a secret?” (they nod) “Well, so can I.”

Being diplomatic at all times is a good business skill to learn and there’s no better time than right now. Here are some different answers for this pesky question based on your comfort level with freely sharing your knowledge. At Otion, one of our Core Values is that we freely share information. I generally divulge everything I can without jeopardizing our core business. Where you fall on this scale (stony silence to verbal fountains) determines how friendly and encouraging you’ll want to be with this answer.

Nice Freely Sharing Knowledge Answer: “I am so flattered that you like my XYZ (scent, color, mold). I get it at Bramble Berry Soapmaking Supplies. Their web site is www.brambleberry.com and their phone number is 1-87-SOAP-STUFF. Soapmaking is so fun and easy! I hope you like it as much as I do!”

Less Sharing but Still Nice Answer: “I am so flattered that you like my XYZ (scent, color, mold). I’d prefer not to share my sources for my supplies but I’m happy to give you some good starting places for you to search around so you can find a (scent, color, mold) that’s unique to you and really appeals to your sense of style.”

“When I started out, I actually bought all of my molds and stuff at Michael’s craft store. You could get a basic starter kit there or you can always go online and Google “Soapmaking Supplies” and some of the top vendors in this industry will pop up. (transition question) So, you’re crafty? What other crafts do you do?”

Alaska Airline’s Machine Help

June 12, 2008 Filed Under: Business Musings

Thank you Dad for this hilarious exchange (if you don’t recall, my Dad also had a puzzling exchange with Cinnabon as well. Click here to read it).

Jenn: Hi, I’m Jenn, your virtual assistant for the Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air Web site. If you need help, or have a question, simply type it below.

You Asked: For my flight (Confirmation Code: BWY*DC Name: FAIOLA/RICHARD Ticket Number: 027-X11X85525X )The web site would not accept my Alaska Air number ([edited out]). Can you help me with correct number?

Jenn: The electronic ticket number and 6 letter confirmation code can be found in your confirmation e-mail or on the Purchased Reservation page. Alaska and Horizon ticket numbers start with 027 and can be found beneath the traveler information.

You Asked: Jenn, you are an attractive woman and your voice is very nice for a machine, but you are worthless.

Jenn: I’m sorry, please let me help you with something else.